This week I tackled Viola's artstyle and look. It was getting hard to explain the game without some sort of visual: everybody has a slightly different idea when you say "JRPG". Plus, I needed to iron out what the game would actually look like, both for myself as well as to talk with others about it.

I worked primarily on a "battle" concept art, and also a bit on what the platforming would look like. I didn't finish up either: had I focused on one I probably would've been able to.

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This week, I worked on expanding the platforming mechanics with several objects and wall jumping. I've always enjoyed wall jumping in games, it's just a satisfying feeling and a great way to make levels a bit more fun. It's a common staple in any platformer at this point, and I'm glad to have figured out how it works. I also worked on several objects like pass-through platforms and springs.

Click read more to go in-depth on what I did this week!

This week, as well as the last, I spent some time designing characters for the game. After all, this is the RPG where you can recruit anyone. So if the NPC's are the game's unique selling point, they should be interesting! And making characters has always been the most fun part of making a story to me.

Click read more to check out more of the process I put into designing characters.

This week I spent most of my time doing the following:

• Writing different physics for 2D objects
• Implementing 2D character control
• Wrote collision and jumps
• Implemented a camera designed for 2D platformers

More information below the break!

I talked a bit in a previous post about the main two inspirations for this game: the game LISA and a few mods for Skyrim. I have a few more ideas that I want to outline, and where these ideas came from.

Viola is my new personal project. It's a 2D platformer/RPG hybrid, the RPG where every NPC can join your party. A set of mods for Skyrim inspired me to take this angle: one where you can ask anyone to be your follower, and one where you can have multiple followers. This turned Skyrim into a sort of JRPG, except with a lot less character depth. Still, Skyrim had a few fun characters, and it was a lot of fun to customize them with gear, battle tactics, and so on.

I tend to focus on character-based stories. Characters and dialogue are simply the most fun for me to think about, or to write, or to draw. It's no surprise that the first thing I did for the project was to conceptualize the main character, Viola herself.

Viola is a story about a young girl, trapped in her own nightmare.

I'm the kind of writer who does a lot of outlining. I want to know what the story is about before I start writing. However, I almost always start with a very specific scene. For Viola, it was a scene about a girl being trapped by her own negative thoughts given a corporeal form by her own fantasy.